caving_fox said:
I always remain surprised at the dearth of caving literature cf mountaineering. There are uncountable tales of Everest, but very very few equivalences in the caving world. I know the number of participants is considerably fewer, but I'm not sure that's the sole answer.
Any new stories would be much appreciated (look at the dates above). I might even find the time to be a beta reader if you want one.
There are lots of
books on Everest, very little literature. Most of those are ghost-written, chest-beating, dime-a-dozen, kindling. I've not read any caving fiction worth reading, at least none with caving as a major theme. I have not, though, read Under Plowman's Floor, and need to give it a look. A book that has been very popular among cavers is called Shibumi, by Rodney Whitaker. It is a male fantasy of violence, vengeance, sex and caving. It is absolute crap.
I've tried to write about caving in every form imaginable, and have come to the realization that I'm not an artist. I have written published articles and essays, public speeches, and a cave book, but my efforts at poetry and fiction are unshareably bad.
Here's a simple poem I've always liked, and it has stuck in my head ever since my first reading. It was written in 1970 by an amateur geologist, now dead, called Warren Luther. He put enormous energy into finding and describing and theorizing on the caves of my home state, almost all of which are so tiny as to be ignored by most cavers. When I took up where he left off, and spent five years searching this neglected karst, this poem came to be more and more personal, and, silly as it is, it's one of my favorites. It is about an unsuccessful attempt to find a reported cave in southern Ohio, US, a cave that I found 45 years later. It was a fine and an emotive thing to sit in the little entrance on a cold November evening and overlook the setting for his old words:
Mattimore in the Dolomite Gorges
Above a din of rockbound waters
I said to him,
My breath is,
tinged with frost,
the sun
has set behind these
crazed hills-
But whither into this November dusk
shall we wander now?
(the fermenting herbage
is a scent made pungent
by keen cold air)
Through it he stepped
cursing
(Whither indeed!)
Indeed!
And he said,
He said-
UP YOURS!!